


pity's forms

by neon395



Series: there's being alive and there's living. [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 21:37:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neon395/pseuds/neon395
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders, sometimes, if they notice the smirk tends to fade once they’ve stopped looking. It’s hard to smile without getting it twisted somewhere along the way, and it always comes out  crooked or bitter. Hood goes up, lips go down. Automatic response, he’d say in his defense. Cause and effect. If no one is watching why bother making the effort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pity's forms

**Author's Note:**

> Brief little drabble examining how Feron would react to being around people again. Angst. Oh the angst. Unbetaed

“You’re obnoxious,” Shepard tells him once. More than once. Feron just smirks and offers to share some choice surveillance footage until he’s chased off with a raised fist. He wonders, sometimes, if they notice the smirk tends to fade once they’ve stopped looking. It’s hard to smile without getting it twisted somewhere along the way, and it always comes out crooked or bitter. Hood goes up, lips go down. Automatic response, he’d say in his defense. Cause and effect. If no one is watching why bother making the effort.

It’s funny how easily people get distracted from really looking when they’re laughing. Even if they’re indignant. 

Which they usually are. 

People can be so touchy. 

\---

“Seeing where the real men work?” He says once to the turian, Garrus, before Liara crashed the ship he’d spent two years (his life, really) on. Given he is at the time sitting on a couch and throwing things at Glyph it’s not surprising that Garrus Vakarian (and Feron knows all about him, knows all about all of them, more than most would ever dream of now) makes a huff of what could be disgust and leaves. Off to save the galaxy, get the medal or die for the cause. 

People know who he is, though…. No shadows for Mr Vakarian, not since Omega.

Feron misses Omega's shadows.

\----

Shepard comes down a bit, though it’s always the same bit of footage they watch; some reporter getting kicked by a Krogan. It’s funny, sure, in an obvious way.

Feron wonders if Shepard feels like a different person since they came back from the dead, and he almost asks, once, what it was like and did it hurt because sometimes he feels he’s been reworked and warped into something new by the years and months and weeks and days of pain now and pain then and nothing but pain in his future-

But it’s Shepard. You don’t just ask Shepard things. He does ask about the reapers, when he thinks Shepard looks at him a bit too long and might start to ask the question: “so what was it like.”

Someone always asks that in the end.

“Best night of my life,” he says sometimes, “thank her for me next mothers day,” or “When I fell from heaven? Hurt my shoulder a bit.”

\----

Liara stares at him the first time they eat together just after the daring rescue because he can’t stop and he flinches badly when she reaches over (he’s not sure what for, if it’s to take the plate or to say something). She looks at his plate, which he’s scrapped clean with his fingers and he stares back at her. 

“Hungry?” she finally says, and he pushes the plate away and leaves to go and throw up. 

It’s too much too soon. That’s sort of funny too, when you think about it. 

“You need to see a doctor,” she says when she walks in on him in his room some weeks later (there is no such thing as privacy) and sees him staring at his arms. They’re shaking violently. He’d been trying to clean his pistol, the pieces now scattered around him like dismembered limbs after an explosion. He rolls his eyes at her. 

“Maybe I like them like this,” he says, mouth twisting even as he wills them to stop shaking, damnit. “Maybe I think it’s an improvement.”

“Are you feeling sorry for yourself?” She asks seriously, and she isn’t accusing him, he can tell, but his frill flares and an angry hum fills his throat. 

“Nope,” he says, “you’re doing a good enough job for both of us on that count.” 

She frowns, the blue skin between her eyebrows puckering, and Feron feels a stab of something like guilt, but there’s so much of that in the air these days it’s easy to miss just one shred more.

He wonders sometimes if Glyph followed him so much because Liara was scared he’s going to off himself or something dramatic. He’d ask her, but she would probably lie. She has gotten much better at that.


End file.
